Quotulatiousness

August 17, 2019

The Drive On Moscow – Russian Civil War Summer 1919 I THE GREAT WAR 1919

Filed under: History, Military, Russia — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

The Great War
Published on 16 Aug 2019

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The summer of 1919 was a pivotal moment in the Russian Civil War. Backed with Allied support the White movement went on the offensive in the East under Alexander Kolchak and in the South under Anton Denikin. However, the Bolsheviks were not wasting time either. They consolidated their power and got the Red Army into shape to crush the enemy once and for all.

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» SOURCES
Smele, Jonathan. The “Russian” Civil Wars 1916-1926 (London: Hurst, 2015).

Makhno, Nestor. The Struggle Against the State and Other Essays. AK Press: Edinburgh & San Francisco, 1996.

Mawdsley, Evan. The Russian Civil War (New York: Pegasus Books, 2005).

Robert Gerwarth, The Vanquished. Why the First World War Failed to End, 1917-1923 (Penguin, 2017)

Sumpf, Alexandre. “Russian Civil War”, in 1914-1918 online. International Encyclopedia of the First World War. https://encyclopedia.1914-1918-online.

Mawdsley, Evan. “International Responses to the Russian Civil War”, in 1914-1918 online. International Encyclopedia of the First World War. https://encyclopedia.1914-1918-online…

Leonhard, Jörn. Der überforderte Frieden. Versailles und die Welt 1918-1923 (CH Beck, 2018).

Figes, Orlando. A People’s Tragedy. The Russian Revolution (London: The Bodley Head, 2017 [1996]).

Gilley, Christopher: “Makhno, Nestor Ivanovich”, in: 1914-1918-online. International Encyclopedia of the First World War, ed. by Ute Daniel, Peter Gatrell, Oliver Janz, Heather Jones, Jennifer Keene, Alan Kramer, and Bill Nasson, issued by Freie Universität Berlin, Berlin 2014-10-08 https://encyclopedia.1914-1918-online…

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The Great War
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The “remarkably worthless” Sea Sparrow missile launchers on RCN Iroquois-class destroyers

Filed under: Cancon, History, Military, Weapons — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Earlier this week, Tyler Rogoway posted a fascinating article about one of the original weapon systems installed on Royal Canadian Navy Iroquois-class destroyers. It was developed specifically for this class, and was eventually replaced with modern Mark 41 Vertical Launch Systems during the ships’ mid-life modernization refits:

Image posted to the Reddit r/WarshipPorn subreddit by u/Admhawk.

From manually aimed box launchers, to automated ones like the Mk29 still in use today, to vertical launch variants, the Sea Sparrow was adapted for many different launching methods. Yet the strangest had to the one found on Canada’s Iroquois class. About seven years ago, someone who had worked with RIM-7s on U.S. Navy vessels told me about how nuts the Canadian launch system was that he had seen demonstrated in the late 1980s. In fact, he said it was so clumsy and slow reacting, that it largely defeated the main purpose of the missile system, at least in a multitude of circumstances. “Remarkably worthless” was the way he described it. I had long forgotten about this exchange until recently when pictures of this exact system popped up on the always lively Reddit page r/Warshipporn. At first, when I saw the images I was flabbergasted as to how weird the setup was, then the memory of the conversation hit me. This is what my contact was talking about!

Four Iroquois-class destroyers were commissioned between 1972 and 1973 and all served until 2005, with the last example being retired two years ago, in 2017. They featured the MKIII Sea Sparrow system fitted inside their forward deckhouse, with doors that opened up on each side and overhead swing-arm launchers carrying four missiles each (eight in total, four on each side) that extended out from their garage-like enclosure that hung out off the side of the ship strangely when at the ready. The whole arrangement looks like something far from conducive to high sea state, not to mention rocket blast from the missiles, or a combat environment, for that matter. 32 missiles were carried in all, with twelve at the ready on each side, but reloading the system as a whole was a slow process.

In addition, it’s said that the Hollandse Signaal Mk22 Weapon Control System wasn’t really up to the task and just deploying the missiles and warming up their guidance systems could take minutes or longer. All of this is far from ideal for what is supposed to have been a fast-reacting point defense system capable of quickly fending off sea-skimming anti-ship missiles that arrive with little warning from over the horizon.

HMCS Iroquois (DDG 280) at Port of Hamburg, near Övelgönne, after mid-life refit replaced the Sea Sparrow launchers (via Wikimedia Commons)

History Summarized: Malta

Filed under: Architecture, Britain, Europe, France, History, Humour, Middle East, Military, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Overly Sarcastic Productions
Published on 16 Aug 2019

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Malta, the Island of A Dozen Empires, chilling in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea, is one of the most social butterflies in History. Having played host to or fought against every major power in the Mediterranean, this island bears a gorgeous architectural and linguistic record of its past, and is still a treasure to behold in the modern day. I’ve covered a lot of nations and empires in my time here, but between the rich cultural blends, the overflowing artistic treasures, and the Still-In-One-Piece-ness of it all, Malta may have one of the strongest claims to being the Winner of History in my book. What’s so special about Malta? Watch and find out!

NOTE on 7:00 – 7:08 — I’m cheating the time-scales a little here. This church, the Rotunda of Mosta, was actually built mid 1800s. Malta’s lavish church construction continued nearly unabated from C. 1565 to the modern day, so I use this example here — but St Paul’s Co-Cathedral in Valletta, shown from 6:27-6:33 is a better example of pure original Baroque construction. Honestly, all of the churches in Malta deserve a look if you’re curious.

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The British Empire in retrospect

Filed under: Books, Britain, History, India — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

It’s been fashionable to dismiss the British Empire as a positive force in history for about 100 years (partly in reaction to the losses during the First World War), but Casey Chalk reviews a recent book that counter-cherry-picks the facts to show it wasn’t all an authoritarian dystopia and cultural wasteland:

… the central argument of University of Exeter professor of history Jeremy Black’s new book Imperial Legacies: The British Empire Around the World, which, according to the book jacket, is a “wide-ranging and vigorous assault on political correctness, its language, misuse of the past, and grasping of both present and future.” The imperial legacy of Great Britain is also, in a way, an instructional lesson for the United States, which, much like the British Empire of the early to mid-20th century, is experiencing a slow decline in influence.

As a former history teacher who has visited many former British colonies in Africa and Asia, I’ve been well catechized in how British imperialism is interpreted. The British, so we are told, were violent aggressors and expert political manipulators. Using their technological superiority and command of the seas, they subjugated cultures across the globe, applied the “divide and rule” policy to set ethnic and linguistic groups against one another, extracted resources for profit, and stole cultural artifacts that now collect dust in their museums. Thus, so the story goes, blame for many of the world’s current problems lies squarely at the feet of the British Empire, for which she should still be paying reparations.

Yet, Black notes, “there is sometimes a failure to appreciate the extent to which Britain generally was not the conqueror of native peoples ruling themselves in a democratic fashion, but, instead, overcame other imperial systems, and that the latter themselves rested on conquest.” Take, for example, the Indian subcontinent, which was a disparate collection of kingdoms and competing empires — including Mughals, Sikhs, Afghan Durranis — during the early centuries of British intervention. All of these were plenty brutal and intolerant towards those they subjugated. Moreover, Hinduism promoted not only the oppressive caste system, but also sati, or the ritual of widow burning, in which widows were either volitionally or forcibly placed upon the funeral pyres of their deceased husbands. It was the British who stopped this practice, and others, with such legislation as the Hindu Widows’ Remarriage Act of 1856, the Female Infanticide Prevention Act of 1870, and the Age of Consent Act of 1891.

Nor has India been able to escape the same imperialist tendencies as the British. Just ask the Sikhs, whose demands to “free Khalistan” have gone unheeded by New Delhi, and who in 1984 suffered great atrocities at the hands of the Indian military and civilian mobs. Or ask Indian Muslims, of whom more than 1,000 died in the 2002 Gujarat riots and who suffer increasing persecution under the ruling Hindu nationalist party BJP. There’s also not a few folks in Kashmir who happen to call the Indians imperialists. One might note here that many of the problems in former European colonies are not solely, or even largely the result of European imperialism, but can be attributed to many other causes, population increase, modernization, and globalization among them. Corruption in some former colonies, including India, is almost certainly higher than it was during British rule.

India is only one such example where the modern narrative ignores both historical and contemporary realities, including, one might add, the fact that India as it now exists is largely a creation of British colonial efforts. It was Britain that united a disparate group of people into a single cohesive unit with a national identity. Indeed, as Black rightly notes, “modern concepts of nationality have generally been employed misleadingly to interpret the policies and politics of the past.”

This is further complicated by the fact that in many places, especially India, “alongside hostility, opposition and conflict,” between the imperialists and the colonized, “there was inter-marriage, intermixing, compromise, co-existence, and the process of negotiation that is sometimes referred to as the ‘middle-ground.'” One need look no further than the First and Second World Wars, in which more than 1.5 million and approximately 2.5 million Indians, respectively, fought willingly and bravely in the service of the British crown.

How Diablo was completely Reverse Engineered without Source Code | MVG

Filed under: Gaming, Technology — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Modern Vintage Gamer
Published on Jul 1, 2019

In 1996 Blizzard Entertainment released Diablo, an Action RPG that sold over 2.5 million copies and defined a genre. In 2018 a developer known as GalaXyHaXz almost completely reverse engineered the code in 4 months and released it as open source. How was this accomplished? Find out in this episode!

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Links

► DevilutionX (Open Source Diablo) https://github.com/diasurgical/devilu…
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QotD: Bridal traditions

Filed under: Business, Europe, Humour, Italy — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

The soap bottle had another claim. “Blue Lavender Essence Lore: Brides in Italy perfumed their wedding clothes with lavender in order to calm their prenuptial jitters”

Left unspoken: Didn’t do jack. You’d think the Brides in Italy would have figured this out in short order, eh? “Here, my child. Soak your dress in lavender. It will calm your nerves.” Did it work for you, mama? “No, I spent the morning sobbing and throwing up in rank terror, since I had only met your father the previous night, and he had the breath of cheese far gone with mold. But this is what we do, for we are superstitious peasants whose worldview is derived not from empirical observation of the world, but sage wisdom Grandmama got from her great-grandmama. Now put these grape stems up your nose so your first-born will be a boy.”

James Lileks, Star Tribune, 2004-05-24.

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